Critic's Notebook; A California New Music Festival, But Not All New or All California

By JOHN ROCKWELL

Published: August 13, 2003

SAN JUAN BAUTISTA, Calif., Aug. 10—
For more than 40 years, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music has been a notable West Coast outpost for new classical music. But the festival, which has had a series of distinguished music directors, has evolved, and new music then is not new music now.

The festival took its name from Cabrillo College, a community college in Aptos, where it used to take place, but it is now based in picturesque Santa Cruz. Most performances are in the Civic Auditorium there, but the final day of the two-week festival consists now of two concerts with the same program in the more intimate Mission San Juan Bautista. This functioning church, lovingly restored, is one of the Spanish colonial missions strung along the California coast.

Festival history dates to some casual concerts in Aptos in 1961. Founded by Robert Hughes, then a student of Lou Harrison, the festival started with a focus on Harrison and his circle of California composers -- musicians who looked to the Pacific, not back across the Atlantic, and who created music more sensuously beautiful than knottily challenging.

But now, as seen from this year's installment, which ran from July 30 to Aug. 10, the net has been cast far wider.

There was still a strong California element. Harrison, who died in February, was honored on Aug. 3 with a concert and an encore recital to benefit the festival. But there was also new music from all over the country, very much including the middle of it, from England (a program with music by John Adams and Thomas Adès) and from the Continent (H. K. Gruber's well-traveled ''Frankenstein!''). There were also Christopher O'Riley's piano transcriptions of songs by the art-rock band Radiohead, Marin Alsop conducting ''Harry Potter'' music by John Williams (which technically counts as contemporary) and a piece by Wladyslaw Szpilman, the composer-pianist who inspired ''The Pianist.''

In 1963 the first of the music directors who have shaped the festival's evolution took over. Gerhard Samuel, then conductor of the Oakland Symphony, was in charge until 1968. The Mexican composer and conductor Carlos Chávez ran it for four years, then Dennis Russell Davies, that indefatigable champion of all things new, was music director from 1974 to 1990.

Mr. Davies returned this year as a pianist for the Harrison celebrations.

Since an abbreviated 1991 festival led by Mr. Adams -- there had been an earthquake, a financial crisis and administrative turmoil, long since resolved -- the festival has been led artistically by Ms. Alsop.

She is routinely mentioned on the short list of promising American conductors who might one day fill major American symphonic posts.

Over the years there has been a steady change of emphasis and even some noncontemporary music. (This year there was a chamber program of mostly Mozart and Schubert.) Mr. Samuel had broader tastes than just the extended San Francisco Bay Area; Mr. Chávez naturally brought in pan-American composers; Mr. Davies conducts every kind of new music there is; and Ms. Alsop has East Coast roots with a strong addition now of things British, since she often conducts there.

But whatever ''new'' means, the excitement of the new still predominates. This enthusiasm holds true both for the upscale, educated audience and for the orchestra. The musicians, mostly from midlevel American professional ensembles, are selected not by audition but by player recommendations, and they perform for only a $55 per diem and free lodging.

''This is the only place I can think of where the phrase, 'Will it sell?' never comes up,'' Ms. Alsop said.

''So many times I rehearse with an orchestra and as soon as they see the front page of a score of new music, they're turned off,'' she continued. ''This is an orchestra that's here to play new music.''

The final program consisted of three West Coast premieres of non-West Coast music. Reflecting these musically conservative times, all of it was accessible, more or less tonal and conceived for regular symphonic instruments conventionally played. In short, too safe.

Augusta Read Thomas's ''Prayer Bells'' (2001) led things off, rather less mystically involving than its title might have promised. Richard Danielpour's ''Metamorphosis'' (1990) might have recalled Richard Strauss's ''Metamorphosen.'' In fact, though, it was a busy, virtuosic piano concerto with Mr. O'Riley as the deft soloist. Mr. Danielpour had lots of ideas in this piece, and some worked nicely, with ingenious effects of orchestration crowding after one another. But the end impression was more technically industrious than emotionally satisfying.

Conductor and orchestra delivered strong accounts of all three scores, and the slightly hard-sounding acoustics surpassed those of most churches. The audience responded with healthy enthusiasm.

Ms. Alsop seems happily settled here for the long haul. She reported that she had joked with Mr. Davies as to who would wind up with the longest festival tenure. She works hard, she said, but the experience is still a relief from her increasingly intense international orchestral rounds.

Photos: The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music closed with three West Coast premieres of non-West Coast music at Mission San Juan Bautista. (Photo by Peter DaSilva for The New York Times)(pg. E8); Marin Alsop leads the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra in California. (Photo by Peter DaSilva for The New York Times)(pg. E1)